Some days I like to sit and let my mind wander about without concentrating very hard on any one thing. Hard winter has set in around here; it’s nothing we can’t handle, but I wonder about all those southerners who have come up here to work in the oil fields. A TV news item showed some of them trying to winterize camper trailers they brought with them. An RV dealer whose business is just down the road from here said in the same newscast that campers really can’t be expected to be very comfortable in the winter season. I don’t envy any of the oil field workers since I don’t think you can put on enough clothes to work around those metal pipes and machines. I wonder if, on a dare, they’d be gullible enough to stick their tongue on a piece of metal.
I checked out the Farmer’s Almanac to see what kind of winter weather they were predicting. Managing Editor Sandi Duncan says it's going to be an "ice cold sandwich … We feel the middle part of the country's really going to be cold — very, very cold, very, very frigid, with a lot of snow," she said. A hundred years ago the forecast was just the opposite. My hometown paper ran this story: “Roscoe Davenport, one of the old time trappers who has been doing an extensive trapping business down in Sargent County predicts that this section of the country is due for a mild and open winter. According to Mr. Davenport, muskrats, skunks, mink, and other fur bearing animals have made little preparation for winter, which the trapper says, is substantiated proof that the winter will not be severe.” There is probably little difference in the accuracy of either the almanac or the trapper. A quick scan of weather records on the internet turned up no results for 1910, so I don’t know how accurate the trapper was, and the next few months will test the almanac’s guess.
Sarah Palin stays in the news, but it appears as if a conservative backlash is developing. Joe Scarborough, a former Republican House member and host of MSNBC‘s “Morning Joe” , said that his party should “man up” against her, Peggy Noonan, the former speechwriter for Reagan called her a “nincompoop”, Barbara Bush said she should stay in Alaska, etc. Maybe her deal is all about making hay while the sun shines, I.e. raking in money.
Sometimes we run onto little things that we remember for a few days. A week ago we stopped at a travel plaza in Fargo to fill gas and use the restrooms. This little haiku pretty much sums up my experience:
on your mark -
hitting a house fly
etched in the urinal
